Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  In fact Pearson did not burn the typescript. It is now in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and betrays a similar quantity of rewriting to the Henderson proofs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But Pearson’s biography was far more entertaining than Henderson’s. To the end of his life Shaw would refer readers to this biography (‘there is nothing better than Hesketh Pearson’), using this recommendation as a deterrent to other potential biographers (‘they are the plagues of my life’) and as a protection against a third blockbuster from Henderson (‘Drop it... are there not other geniuses... much less written-to-rags than I?’). He felt so pleased by Pearson’s success that, having warned him never to reveal his co-authorship, he began speaking openly of his involvement. In Pearson’s own copy, under the biographer’s signature, Shaw added his own name: ‘Also his humble collaborator G. Bernard Shaw.’

  4

  Paperback and Celluloid

  These accursed films are complicating life beyond endurance.

  Shaw to Trebitsch (28 April 1931)

  When planning to launch the New Statesman before the war Shaw had written to Beatrice Webb: ‘I have no faith in the success of any sixpenny journal that cannot be bought by the casual railway traveller with the certainty that there will be something in it to while away an hour of his journey in a pleasant and amusing way.’ It was a casual railway traveller, searching Exeter railway station one weekend for a pleasant and amusing book, who went on to create the sixpenny paperback revolution of the 1930s. Allen Lane’s idea of mass-producing reprints of good contemporary writing in ‘strong paper covers’ and selling them for the price of ten cigarettes seemed to his cautious rivals a formula for bankruptcy. ‘The steady cheapening of books is in my opinion a great danger in the trade,’ the managing director of Chatto & Windus warned him at the end of 1934.

  In several ways Lane was rather a Shavian character: leaving school at sixteen, pursuing his vision on Exeter railway station in opposition to all the experts, puzzling many employees with his superior claims to near-illiteracy, and rising to become (as the publishing historian Ian Norrie called him) ‘a man of action in the world of words’.

  Shaw bought many of these early Penguins – the novels in their orange covers, biography in blue and detective fiction in green – and in August 1936 he wrote to Lane recommending his friend Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. Lane replied that the book he really wanted was The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. He offered G.B.S. the same terms as other Penguin authors and G.B.S. did not quibble: he was eager to be part of this new paperback movement. Having arranged for his paperback to be set by his Edinburgh printer, R. & R. Clark, ‘who is accustomed to my ways’, Shaw added two new chapters ‘dealing with events that have occurred since its first publication in 1928’, extended the title to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, and drafted a note explaining that ‘the present edition is in fact a better bargain than the first edition was, though the price is so much more modest’.

  The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, appearing in two pale blue volumes at sixpence each, heralded a parallel series of paperbacks called Pelicans. This was an even more radical enterprise than the Penguin list, breaking the convention of reprinting only books already published by other houses, and aiming to extend adult education by making works on politics, economics, the social sciences, literature, the natural sciences and the visual arts cheaply available to ‘the intelligent layman’. The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, The Inequality of Man by J. B. S. Haldane, Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life and H. G. Wells’s A Short History of the World were among the early Pelican titles, as well as works by Julian Huxley, R. H. Tawney, the Fabian economist G. D. H. Cole and Beatrice Webb. The future of this ambitious list, to which Clement Attlee credited the Labour Party victory in 1945, was guaranteed by the success of Shaw’s two opening volumes in the summer of 1937.

  This success also guaranteed his own future as a Penguin author which was to be celebrated on his ninetieth birthday by the ‘Shaw Million’ – simultaneous publication in Britain of ten titles in editions of 100,000 copies each. It was Allen Lane’s most risky speculation yet: ‘no venture which I have undertaken in thirty years of publishing has given me so much pleasure,’ he later wrote. Nearly all the staff were involved in the project and they were in the office by eight o’clock on 26 July 1946. The first telephone call came from the manager of W. H. Smith’s in Baker Street. He had been surprised by the length of the bus queue that morning outside his shop. Surprise swelled to amazement as he realized that these were members of a rare – perhaps dying – species, the general reader, lining up for the Shaw Million. In six weeks the Shaw Million was sold out.

  *

  Shaw’s Penguins included ‘screen versions’ of Pygmalion and Major Barbara which were offshoots of his new career in the cinema. From the early years of the century he had loved silent films. He could not keep away from them. And the new motion picture companies could not keep away from G.B.S. The offers flowed in – from $50,000 for one play to $1 million early in 1920 for the rights to all his plays. He gave a variety of reasons for his refusals: that he was too old a dog to learn new tricks; that he had no wish to become a ‘dumb dramatist’; that films killed plays and ‘my plays are still alive’.

  During the 1920s, films were suspected of being a threat to the work of novelists and playwrights in much the same way as photographers in the late nineteenth century had been seen as the enemies of Victorian painting. Shaw’s enthusiasm for films was a development of his interest in photography. He predicted that the cinema would be an invention of even more revolutionary significance than printing. Films told their stories to the illiterate as much as to the literate – ‘that is why the cinema is going to produce effects that all the cheap books in the world could never produce’. He foresaw a time when motion pictures would ‘form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct,’ he had written in 1914, ‘will be those of the film.’ One day pictures would be ‘brought to my home for me’ and it was in this direction, he told a journalist, ‘that you must look for the most important changes’.

  His cat and mouse tactics with the movie moguls partly reflected his sense of a film world in transition. The screen’s silence had been ‘the only reason I did not permit the filming of my plays, because their greatest strength was in their dialogue’. Meanwhile he did not want to sell his rights and lose control of his property.

  The day he had long awaited began with The Jazz Singer, shown in the United States by Warner Brothers in the fall of 1927. Shaw had already conducted a studio experiment that summer at the DeForest Phonofilm Company employing Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson to test five minutes of the Cathedral Scene from Saint Joan, and in the next two years he made several appearances himself on Movietone newsreels and in screen interviews. ‘I believe that acting and drama can be portrayed far more effectively as well as lucratively from the screen than from the stage,’ he wrote in 1930. Yet he hesitated, did not proceed with the filming of Saint Joan, and three years later turned instead to his one-act skit, How He Lied to Her Husband.

  The choice was significant. This pièce d’occasion had originally been composed in 1904 as a curtain-raiser ‘to satirize those who took Candida to be a sentimental glorification of eroticism’ and now came to serve its turn again, illustrating Shaw’s contention that ‘the whole history of the “movies” showed that “sex-appeal” was a thing that could be neglected almost altogether’. The heroine of Shaw’s play is ‘a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37’, and there are only two other people: her thick-necked City husband and a dreamy young admirer. The action, which revolves round a missing bundle of love poems (signifying the missing sex-appeal), takes place in a curtained room on the Cromwell Road and its shadowy simplicity reflects Shaw’s view of the technical limitations of British fi
lms in 1930.

  The question Shaw was examining with the film version of How He Lied was whether the best use of the medium lay in recording a perfect production of a play for showing round the world. He chose Cecil Lewis, the wartime flying ace who had been so helpful with his wireless career, to direct it, and persuaded British International Pictures to accept this ‘absolutely unknown, untried man as director’. It was shot ‘without transpositions interpolations omissions or any alterations misrepresenting the Author whether for better or worse except such as the Author may consent to or himself suggest’ – a standard clause in Shaw’s later contracts. Cecil Lewis rehearsed the cast of three until they were word and action perfect, worked out some camera angles for the cameraman, and completed the film in four days. But it ‘was as much like a movie as a cow is like a pianola’. When it came to be shown in London in January 1931 The Times commented on ‘the folly of those who suppose that the right use, and the commercial use, of the talkie invention is direct transference from stage to screen’.

  Shaw defended this trial film as part of his campaign against the ‘children’s picture book’ story-telling of Hollywood. The acting in Hollywood was good, the photography excellent and the expenditure one of the wonders of the world. But when it came to the script, Shaw liked to imagine, they called in the bell boy. ‘The bell boy’s vision of life is a continual arriving in motor-cars and going upstairs and disappearing through doors that immediately close and leave life a blank... 95 per cent of a film must consist of going up and down stairs and getting in and out of motor-cars... My plays do not depend on staircases for their interest.’

  Shaw’s guerrilla warfare against the big Hollywood corporations and movie moguls is a reminder of his embattled days fighting the West End theatre managements and actor-managers of the Victorian stage. Both were happy to mutilate texts to suit their star performers. The dialogue of How He Lied was continuous, he pointed out, and the entire action took place in the same room.

  ‘The usual changes from New York to the Rocky Mountains, from Marseilles to the Sahara, from Mayfair to Monte Carlo, are replaced by changes from the piano to the sideboard, from the window to the door, from the hearth rug to the carpet. When the husband arrives he is not shewn paying his taxi, taking out his latchkey, hanging up his hat, and mounting the stairs. There is no time for that sort of baby padding when the action of a real play is hastening to its climax.’

  Lewis’s next film with Shaw was Arms and the Man. Shaw had received an offer from Sam Goldwyn who ‘wants to cut the play down to forty minutes’. He trusted Lewis to make a full-length version, but the filming was a dismal experience. ‘We were a little like a pilotless ship,’ remembered Barry Jones who played Bluntschli. The actor cast in the part of Nicola, the manservant, died of a heart attack; and the prolonged attempts to recreate Bulgaria in North Wales were wonderfully unconvincing. In the end Lewis surrendered the film into the hands of what Shaw had called ‘the business staff’ who, no less philistine than their colleagues in the United States, cut it ineptly.

  Working with Lewis’s scenario, Shaw had this time made a real attempt to adapt his play into a film. His alterations to the script show that he was beginning to develop a film technique, and had come to accept that, though the dramatic principles of stage and screen might be the same, the methods must differ. ‘The whole action of the play has to be confined to three scenes, two of them indoors,’ he wrote.

  ‘In the picture the battle is shewn, and the flight of the fugitive whom the heroine shelters. There is no pinning of the characters to one spot: they pass in and out of doors, upstairs and downstairs, into the gardens and across mountain country, with the freedom and variety impossible in the room with three walls which, however scene-painters may disguise it, is always the same old stage.’

  This statement, contradicting what he had written after How He Lied, is Shaw’s commitment to future film-making. ‘My mind is always changing – it is not only a woman’s privilege,’ he said when asked in January 1933 to comment on his decision to allow RKO Studios in the United States to film The Devil’s Disciple starring John Barrymore. British films were hopeless because ‘they have no money,’ he wrote that April to Kenneth MacGowan, an associate producer at RKO, ‘and want to put in minutes (mostly wasted) where months are needed’.

  The script by Lester Cohen arrived at Ayot St Lawrence in January 1934. A month later, Shaw called the deal off. Cohen’s script was beyond rescue. ‘I cannot be expected to lend a hand to my own murder.’

  This episode left G.B.S. curiously stranded. ‘Hollywood is not within half a century of knowing how to handle my stuff,’ he wrote to Theresa Helburn, the executive director of the Theatre Guild. ‘...I contemplate the popular Hollywood productions in despair.’ But he did not despair of the future of films. His optimism soon appeared justified. By the summer of 1934 he was considering proposals from both Paris and Berlin for the filming of Pygmalion. In February 1935 he signed an agreement with Eberhard Klagemann, head of a Berlin film company. Helping Trebitsch was one of his incentives. He bought Trebitsch’s half-share in the German language rights of Pygmalion, insisted that Klagemann should use his own screenplay and arranged that Trebitsch be employed to translate it.

  The German film of Pygmalion (first shown in Berlin in September 1935) and the Dutch Pygmalion (first shown in Amsterdam in March 1937) were commercially quite successful: but Shaw loathed them. ‘I don’t know what they did with my scenario, but they certainly did not use it for the film,’ he said after seeing the German version at the beginning of 1936. In fact Shaw was not credited with the screenplay and Trebitsch not listed as translator.

  Almost immediately after finishing the Pygmalion script, Shaw had started on one of Saint Joan. At the end of November 1934 he handed it to the Viennese actress Elizabeth Bergner who had created the role of Joan ten years earlier in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production. Bergner had recently married the Hungarian producer-director Paul Czinner who planned to form a syndicate including Twentieth Century-Fox and produce the film of Saint Joan starring his wife. But Czinner, who professed himself delighted with this screenplay, then sent it without consulting G.B.S. to the Scottish dramatist James Bridie for rewriting; and Bridie contacted Shaw to ascertain whether this was being done with his approval. The cat was out of the bag.

  Worried that Twentieth Century-Fox would not put up money if there was a risk of Saint Joan being subjected to a Catholic boycott, Czinner had also submitted Shaw’s scenario to a newly created organization at the Vatican, called Catholic Action, which monitored the lay activities of the Church. Their report condemned the film as ‘a satire against Church and State’, and an ‘attack to the R.C.C.’ by the ‘mocking Irishman’. Unless the film script was substantially altered, the film would be met by a Catholic veto.

  Shaw knew that during the Depression film speculators in the United States traded in near-pornography and that there had been a counterattack from such organizations as the Legion of Decency. To regain control of their industry, American movie producers formed a Production Code Administration in 1934 which was already leading to what Shaw called ‘an epidemic of censorships’. He saw Hollywood as being in a pitiable condition, and urged film corporations in the United States to ‘pluck up enough courage and public spirit to insist on the control of film morality being made a federal matter, independent of prudes, of parochial busy-bodies, and doctrinaire enemies of the theatre as such’.

  ‘I have now cried off the film, and excommunicated Czinner with bell, book, and candle,’ Shaw informed James Bridie in the summer of 1935. How long would he have to wait for an independent director who would carry his films to victory over these ‘goddams’ of Hollywood?

  *

  After more than fifteen years with G.B.S., Blanche Patch was an expert at fobbing off pests. The mail bulged with petitions from burglars, chemists, coffin makers, sailors, schoolboys, all of them ‘howling to be answered’; and Miss Patch typed out the answers.

/>   Those who wanted money were tiresome. They would demand anything from £2 to £20,000 and for all sorts of far-flung reasons: to save fifteen repertory theatres; help thousands of refugees; marry off an Indian gentleman’s six daughters. It vexed Miss Patch to see the amounts of money her employer simply handed away – often, she thought, to the most undeserving. Such people, ‘greedy for a flicker from the flame’, were trying to ‘poach on his reputation’. At a distance he seemed all things to all people, a father- and eventually a grandfather-confessor to the whole world.

  Everyone turned to him: men who were thinking of entering the priesthood or taking up carpentry; women wondering whether to risk a divorce or send their daughters on the stage; children who wanted to name a pig or hedgehog after him. There were explorers needing radio apparatus for a whaling expedition; importers eager to bring a frost-resistant potato into Britain; inventors seeking Shaw’s endorsement to promote schemes for causing clouds to dissolve and distilled water to consolidate into stone, or his testimonial to prevent cures for cancer, lunacy and hallucinations being stolen.

  ‘I believe you have always had a warm corner in your heart for women and fanatics,’ wrote a woman. ‘I am a non-entity, you an entity,’ wrote a man. G.B.S. was peculiarly the saint of the isolated, the odd, drowning women, desperate men – ‘a doctor of the human soul,’ one correspondent called him. Like Sherlock Holmes, he had a reputation for solving people’s problems. They wrote to enquire where they should live, what they should do in retirement, how they should get out of jail. A number of people on the verge of murder or suicide tried him as their penultimate resort. ‘I feel a little lonely,’ admitted a twenty-one-year-old girl from New York, ‘...I love you very dearly.’ ‘I am rather stout and ugly,’ explained a boy in South Africa, ‘...how should I go about getting friends.’ ‘I think your patronage was the greatest pleasure my poor father ever had,’ claimed the son of a Colchester newsagent after his father’s death.